An Unconventional Guide to Emotional Intelligence
Have you ever felt hijacked by your emotions? Tried desperately to manage them, only to find stray anger or frustration bubbling up at the wrong time? And now, with widespread hardship and anxiety on the rise, how much energy are we expending to numb feelings in order to continue to function. I can’t think of a better time to harness the energy of our emotions and integrate it into our thoughts and actions.
We go to emotional intelligence seminars, scold ourselves for negative feelings, disdain others when they are too positive, and in the end numb ourselves to our emotions to function better or not to burden others. Could there be another way?
What is Emotional Intelligence?
When I asked my 15-year-old daughter what “emotional intelligence” meant to her, she answered, without a second of hesitation, “Thinking with your emotions.” She went on to explain that we are whole, with all our emotions and our thinking—wisdom from the mouth of teens.
How do you think with your emotions? I argue that it is not by controlling or managing them. Rather, it is by feeling them deeply and cultivating them, like a farmer would a seed, understanding and nourishing them so they yield the results we want.
What Is Emotion?
The brain is constantly interpreting the meaning of internal and external sensations—that’s its job. Sometimes the meaning comes out as a thought, sometimes as a perception, sometimes as an emotion, with a physical, hormonal response that lasts about 90 seconds. Either it feels pleasant and you want more, or it feels uncomfortable and you don’t. In any case, after that initial sensation, the brain takes over and reconstructs a response from past memories.
My ego is struggling a bit to admit how unbearably simplistic we ultimately are. The cool thing is we can hack this. In the end, emotions are just sensation and energy, after all.
The Truth about Emotions
Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett thankfully lays to rest the myth of emotion and reason battling it out in your mind. “There’s no part of your brain that’s devoted to emotion that isn’t used when also in moments when you are being rational.” She specifies that “you can have very rational decision making when there’s a lot of affect going on.” What a relief.
The Basics of Emotional Regulation
Feldman Barret is clear, for the brain to interpret the world in a balanced way, you need energy. We need energy for all our cognitive functions, including “social cognition,” which includes being in-tune with our emotional responses. When we are depleted, it’s usually social cognition that goes first.
“You need to sleep, exercise, get off your devices, hug your kids, play games,” Feldman Barrett says. “When we feel emotions, there is a physiological response to the environment around us, and we need to recover afterwards. We expend a lot of energy, and if we don’t get it back some way, we get exhausted.”
If you’re tired, sleep deprived, nutritionally deprived, and your hormones are out of whack, you get hijacked. It’s that simple.
Expanding Your Emotional Bandwidth
Developing awareness of our emotions from an observer point of view allows us to to create some distance between ourself and our emotions, to befriend them and use them skilfully. It helps to name them precisely. You can geek out on this using the Universe of Emotions app, which lists over 2000 different emotions.
Ultimately, this allows us to separate our identity from our emotional reactions. They are mine, but not me.
Deep Feeling
Coaches are always talking about getting uncomfortable. Cold showers will do this. So will sitting with one’s emotions, to really feel the physical sensation, the felt sense and not react.
We often slip immediately into negative story cycles when we feel an uncomfortable emotional sensation. Yet, have you ever noticed how similar fear and excitement feel?
What if you changed the narrative? What if you made it empowering? I don’t know about you, but anger really helps me get things done. And fear is energizing.
Discovering how to capture that energy and direct it where you want it, now that is the practical implementation of “thinking with your emotions.”
Hacking Emotional Regulation
The top hack for emotional intelligence is to factor in rest and replenishment—rituals are good for this, as they don’t require a lot of energy.
Here are a few more:
Recognize your triggers. Prepare for them.
Use the intensity of your affect as a cue to stop and question what’s going on.
In moments of intense emotion, choose to focus your attention on your body. Change your experience. Your mind goes where your attention goes.
Once you realize that you can choose how you react to an emotion, you can cultivate the reactions you want to feel. Imagine them. Visualize them. Practice feeling them.
Allow yourself existential breaks, when you think about the immensity of the universe or feel awe. They provide another kind of rest.